Tech —

Review: Nexus 10 tablet is a solid house built on shifting sands

Platform needs a decent app store to thrive, and fast.

CPU

We'll begin with Geekbench, which measures processor and memory performance across different platforms—Geekbench scores shouldn't be affected much by differences between iOS and Android, so it's a relatively reliable benchmark for cross-platform comparisons.

Between its relatively high clock speed and its improved architecture, the Exynos 5 is the undisputed king of Geekbench, beating out even Apple's high-performance A6X by an impressive margin. Note the impressive memory bandwidth scores, especially—Cortex-A9 processors like the Apple A5X and NVIDIA Tegra 3 have long been blighted by unimpressive memory bandwidth, but ARM's and Apple's new architectures go a long way toward curing that deficiency.

Note also that the quad-core chips in our test suite are posting some deceptive scores here—the extra cores help out in synthetic benchmarks because they tend to use all of the cores at once, but in phones and tablets right now, much more software is optimized for use with two cores than with four. Thus, even in situations (like the Integer score) where the Galaxy Note 10.1 appears to beat the Nexus 10, real-world performance should still heavily favor the newer tablet.

You can feel this especially in things like boot time—the Nexus 7 takes 43.8 seconds to boot from the time you press the power button to the time the tablet is ready to use. The Nexus 10 takes just 18.6 seconds to do the same thing. Samsung could also be using faster flash memory in the Nexus 10 relative to the stuff in the Nexus 7, but either way apps and Web pages are much quicker to load on the larger tablet. The Nexus 7 still doesn't feel slow, but the Nexus 10 puts it to shame.

The usual caveats about JavaScript benchmarks apply here: these scores have at least as much to do with the different platforms' JavaScript implementations as with the underlying hardware. Comparing apples to apples (or, rather, Androids to Androids), though, the Exynos 5 boosts scores over older, slower chips like those in the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7—more so in the newer, more-intense Octane benchmark than in the older, lighter SunSpider test, which at this point is really becoming a little too old to tell us meaningful things about processor performance.

GPU

Apple and Imagination Technologies, the company that supplies the GPU side of Apple's ARM chips, have long pushed the envelope in its phones and tablets when it comes to graphics performance, and as a result iOS devices tend to have better graphics performance than the Android-based competition. The Nexus 10 is a definite step forward here, but Apple's surprise introduction of the fourth-generation iPad and its beefy A6X SoC keeps Cupertino in the lead on this one.

The Nexus 10 is still no slouch, though, and it does beat the third-generation iPad by a small but measurable amount. This is more obvious in GLBenchmark's Offscreen tests, which puts all of the GPUs on the same footing by rendering scenes at 1080p, but it's even more impressive in the Onscreen tests, since the Nexus 10 has to run the tests at a higher 2560x1600 resolution rather than the Retina iPad's lower 2048x1536. In any case, the Nexus 10 can't take the performance crown here, but it's still quite competitive, and as we noted in our iPad 4 review, developers may not be fully utilizing that tablet's increased graphics performance any time soon.

It's also important to note that in at least some cases much of this increased GPU performance is soaked up by the high-resolution screen, resulting in a device with higher absolute performance than previous-generation devices, but similar apparent performance. You can see this in the Egypt Classic test, where the Nexus 7 and Galaxy Note 10.1 can keep up with the performance of the vastly superior Nexus 10 and iPad 4. It should also be noted that, like the Retina iPads, the extra processing power under the hood makes the tablet quite warm in spots during heavy use (though not warm enough to cause the speed throttling issues the Nexus 4 suffers from).

Battery life

We wanted to run the Nexus 10 through a battery of tests to see what kind of usable life you can expect in a variety of situations—Google promises about nine hours of usable battery life when watching video, but these manufacturer claims are often optimistic. In all of our tests, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were both enabled, the tablet's screen brightness was set to 50 percent, and the automatic light sensor was disabled—re-enabling it or choosing to turn the screen brightness down or up manually will change these numbers accordingly.

In our light use and Web browsing test, we streamed some music from Spotify and alternated between browsing pages with Chrome and reading things in the Kindle app. The tablet lasted a respectable nine hours and 26 minutes while performing these activities.

Then, I switched to video, streaming content from both Hulu and Netflix. While doing this, the tablet lasted for around eight hours and 40 minutes, a hair under Google's estimates, but not by too much.

Finally, to look at battery performance while gaming, we turned to GLBenchmark 2.5's battery life test. Running the Egypt HD test non-stop with the screen set to half brightness, the battery lasted for a much shorter 3 hours and 45 minutes. Gaming is a big battery muncher in the best of times, but the iPad 4 we reviewed was able to run this test for just over five-and-a-half hours, a substantial step up.

Overall, the Nexus 10's battery life isn't bad, and for general use it's pretty close to Google's estimates. Gamers beware, though—unleashing the Exynos 5's full performance will drain the battery rapidly.

It's the apps, stupid!

Compare the Nexus 10 to the first modern Android tablet, the Motorola Xoom. It launched in Feburary of 2011 for $499, but was overshadowed almost immediately the next month by the lighter, faster iPad 2. The version of Android it shipped with, Honeycomb, was so shaky that Google actually withheld its code from the Android Open Source Project repositories, preventing modders and the open-source community from working with it. It wasn't an altogether bad tablet, but it didn't make a strong case for Android in the tablet market and ended up being the first of many 10-inch Android tablets that didn't make a splash.

In contrast, the Nexus 10's hardware and operating system are both fundamentally sound. Android 4.2 is an essentially mature, polished operating system, and graphics performance is the only metric in which the fourth-generation iPad is unmistakably superior. Otherwise, the tablet you prefer will really depend on the operating system that you like more—both are well-constructed, fast, and high-quality devices, and the Nexus 10 beats the Retina iPad's entry price by $100 to boot.

One problem remains: apps. The Android app ecosystem isn't bad—meat-and-potatoes productivity staples like Dropbox, Twitter, and Evernote are all present and accounted for—but there are still issues that keep it second to iOS. For one, I would argue that there are certain application categories—games and magazines, particularly—where developers tend to target iOS first, with Android applications following later (if ever). Most of the more prominent touch game developers—Rovio with Angry Birds and its ilk, Zynga with Words with Friends and Draw Something, Halfbrick with Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride—have their games in both the iTunes Store and Google Play. Venture a bit off the beaten path and nearly all of my favorite touchscreen games from the past couple of years are iOS exclusives—Tiny Wings, Spelltower, Ticket to Ride Pocket, Hero Academy, Super Hexagon, and 10000000 are but a few examples. Things like the Humble Bundle for Android indicate that this trend may be beginning to reverse itself, but for now iOS is the first place to go for touch gaming.

The other major problem is quite well-documented at this point: of the apps that are in Google Play, many are targeted toward smaller phone-sized screens rather than tablet screens. On the 7-inch Nexus 7, this is more forgivable, but there's no place for phone apps to hide in the vast expanse of a 10-inch screen. To demonstrate:

Enlarge/ I'll stop trotting Twitter out as an example when the Twitter for Android app stops sucking so much on tablets.

Enlarge/ Ditto Spotify, which doesn't even work in landscape mode. The list goes on.

The Nexus 10 was created in part to help solve this problem. "Part of the reason why we've invested significantly in building [the Nexus 10] is exactly so that we have more and more motivation for the developer community," Android director of product management Hugo Barra told The Verge—in short, now that there's a suitable 10-inch Android tablet available for a competitive price, Google hopes developer interest will begin to spike. Google also recently published a set of guidelines designed to goad developers into making better tablet apps for the operating system.

Even if this happens, though, it puts early adopters in the uncomfortable position of having to purchase something now based on hopes that it will fulfill all of its promise at some unspecified later date. If any tablet hardware is going to be able to drive these changes, the Nexus 10 (and the Nexus 7) is it, but as we've seen with the failed Android Update Alliance, Google's efforts to steer the wider Android ecosystem with light touches haven't always borne fruit.

The Good

Solid, injection-molded plastic makes for a tablet that is both sturdy and light

High-resolution screen is nice and crisp

Samsung's Exynos 5 delivers excellent performance

Delivers high-end hardware starting at $399, $100 less than the Retina iPads

Decent front-facing stereo speakers

Good (if not exceptional) battery life for general use

The Bad

Screen's viewing angles and color are slightly inferior to that of the iPad

We prefer the lightly textured back of the Nexus 7 to the Nexus 10's rubbery back

No cellular option at present

No storage expansion

Poor battery life while gaming

The Ugly

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Android's tablet app ecosystem is as weak as ever

Promoted Comments

No sd card slot for nexus 10 = a negative in the summary of the review,No sd card slot for ipad mini = not even mentioned in the summary of the review on ars.

Quoted For Frickin Truth

This isn't a problem with the Nexus review, it's a problem with the Apple review. Except that everyone "knows" that Apple doesn't offer SD card slots, so it becomes an assumption by the reviewers, rather than brought up as a true negative, as it should.

Actually this is an interesting point, because everything you write must be tailored to the reader to some extent. If you are writing for Ars, where everyone knows that Apple doesn't include SD card readers on their tablets (although there is a $29 adapter, so it's not an insurmountable problem), should you point that out every time? It's Dog bites man, it's not news. If they ever add one, then that's Man bites dog and worthy of a mention.

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew wrote and edited tech news and reviews at Ars Technica from 2012 to 2017, where he still occasionally freelances; he is currently a lead editor at Wirecutter. He also records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites